Writing at work was good.
I wrote the newsletter, Pradeep’s Space Newsletter #49. 49 posts since July 2019.
I read/listened to:
I had a back injury. This allowed me just two days of playing badminton this week.
The same meant that no cycling got done either.
Another week where most of the writing was focused on work. I did not get any other writing done.No blog posts. No newsletter post.
I read/listened to:
I got back to playing badminton this week. I got the badminton racket gutted again.
I got no cycling done this week.
I delivered a lot of writing work this week. Left me in a high. But, this did not overflow to other writing. No blog posts. No newsletter. No other writing.
I watched:
I read/listened:
I am probably going to focus on one and not on both. I stopped the badminton middle of this week. I am going to focus on cycling.
I cycled for a day for about 11.3 km.
Focus continued to stay on work related writing this week. I hope to complete and deliver many of these in the next week.
I managed to write one blog post:
I managed to also send out one edition of Pradeep’s Space Newsletter:
I wrote one post on my Tumblr, Working Column:
This week’s writing was not of the quality that I would have preferred but means that I shipped content.
I watched:
I am reading/listening to:
Another week of no cycling.
Played badminton on all days save one.
Fortune India did an interview with Chairman, ISRO Dr. S. Somanath. This was one of the exchanges in the interview.
Commercial human space travel is something which private players in some countries are offering. Can ISRO do this?
We can, but it is not our job. It is the job of the industry. ISRO is a national agency. ISRO can develop the technology. But the practice of government funding ISRO to develop technology is going to stop. If a technology is needed, it will be developed by ISRO and industry through government-industry funding. So, now, the industry will have to put money into technology development. They have to do some R&D and develop technology.
This is an interesting comment and perhaps provides an insight into how ISRO thinks of its evolving role in the new space policy regime in India post-2019.
NSIL, the Department of Space’s commercial arm signaled the intention to move to a demand-driven model in the space sector. As an example, GSAT-24 was India’s first demand-driven satellite that NSIL/ISRO built for Tata Play (DTH service provider).
If you read through the whole interview, you can see the lengths to which Somanath goes to protect ISRO’s role while trying to push the idea that industry must lead in the future. This is a new tension for ISRO to hold. I don’t think there is enough clarity on how this will happen for him to communicate the message well.
The lower volume of work completed in Week 9 meant that more work-related writing got done than anything else. I did not write any blog posts. I did not publish the weekly space newsletter. I did not attend the RozWrite sessions.
I watched:
Of the lot, I enjoyed watching Nanpakal… the most. I had to watch the review by Baradwaj Rangan to really appreciate the movie more.
I am reading/listening to:
Another week without cycling. I played badminton on all days this week.
Again, a poor writing week. Two weeks in a row means it is time to buck up.
I was able to write three blog posts for the blog:
I did not publish the weekly space newsletter. I did not attend the RozWrite sessions. The contribution to the work writing was lower as well because of power cuts and fever.
I continued watching OTT. I moved from watching Malayalam and to other languages:
I especially liked the alternate rock intro music and music interlaced in a period drama in Lidia Poet.
I finished listening to Four Thousand Weeks and wrote a blog post about it.
I did not get any cycling done.
I played badminton only on two days. I played on Monday and Wednesday. I had a beginnings of fever on Tuesday and actual fever on Thursday and Friday.
The question my wife had was how do the planets that are on either side of the Earth are seen together in the night sky.
When we see from Earth, Jupiter must be on the other side of the Sun. Whereas, Venus could be between the Sun and Earth or between the Sun and Jupiter.
This is the first time that I tried to capture a celestial event with a mobile phone camera and edited it.
I picked up Four Thousand Weeks to listen to on Audible.
I first heard of the book on Cal Newport’s appearance on the Tim Ferriss Show (Episode 568). Ferriss then posted a chapter of the book on his blog. From the introduction on the post it seemed like he was deeply affected by it. It did not affect me that deeply.
I subscribed to his newsletter, The Imperfectionist and read a few of his blog posts. I found that I could not focus on what he was trying to say. Hence, I decided to pick his audiobook.
His website gives a succinctly good summary of the book. What he adds in the book is evidence and anecdotes to back up the claim.
The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief.
If you live to be 80, you’ll have had about 4,000 weeks. But that’s no reason for despair.
Confronting our radical finitude – and how little control we really have – is the key to a fulfilling and meaningfully productive life.
If you need practical takeaways from the book, I’d suggest watching Nathan Lozeron’s summary of the book on his YouTube channel, Productivity Game which also has a nice 1-page PDF summary.
On listening I found a lot of overlap with concepts from Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, the Gita’s exhortation to follow process and not be swayed by outcomes, and Warren Buffet’s advice to his pilot.
A couple of weeks ago, I got notified by Rakesh about an ISRO exhibition at VJTI in Mumbai. I got the same message forwarded from multiple sources other than Rakesh as well – in WhatsApp messages, Tweets, etc. The message seemed to have gone viral.
The other option was to visit IUCAA in Pune for a National Science Day event on Sunday, March 26.
I decided to visit Mumbai for the same and take along my daughter by bus. Over the next week, this plan expanded to include my wife and our son. The mode of transport also changed to our car.
We underestimated the time it would take to prepare for the ride, the time to travel, and the time for all things in between. The decisions change so much with just a 2 month old kid who has to be carried. We reached late on Saturday and I saw messages from my group that it was better to avoid the ISRO exhibition than go there. Hence, skipped it.
It seemed to have been serious enough to make the news the next day.
We spent the Saturday and Sunday in Mumbai and returned to Pune by Sunday evening. Son was cranky a bit in the end stretch of the travel to Mumbai. Else he was good on the way from and to Mumbai. All in all, we enjoyed the weekend drive.
For ISRO, it shows the demand for exhibitions like these north of Bangalore/Bengaluru.
Parallel Spirals 